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Why so little performance improvements year after year?

Radiation

Radiation

Radiation

Soldato
Joined
12 Oct 2003
Posts
4,027
Im getting tired of seeing 10% improvement if we're lucky, i miss the days of doubling every 18 months, even if they gave us more cores each gen we don't see much real benefit, sure it's not about ghz but it doesn't mean single core performance should be so poor, im not sure if there's really much point in upgrading any more, has progress pretty much stagnated?

At this rate it seems we'll be lucky if we see performance double in ten years, the only way they can make up for it is to start doubling core count each gen so we can finally play some realtime raytraced games.

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http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-cpu-performance
 
Wasn't most of you question answered in here :p
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=24504881#post24504881

To be fair though it's not a bad thread topic for discussion to have.

Some reasons behind a reduced generational improvement in single thread performance:
Pre 1990-2005 single thread perf was heavily driven by clockspeed. A focus on the mobile market has made low power and low heat a priority. Transistor design for focus on low power rather than high clockspeed (diminishing returns due to power, temp and impracticability - so who wants your chip and what do you win for your efforts- offputting anyway).
In each process shrink, more die space now allocated to what used to be chipset and co-processor functions. Can progress be defined solely by one metric?
 
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I still don't understand why we don't get more for our money, if they have high quality components and can't give us more than 10% every gen then they should at least give us more cores and/or a higher version for the same price point, so a 4670K is at least as good as a 3770k plus architecture improvements, this is how i always believed it should work with gpu's as well, we seem to get small improvements at the mid range while only the high end really improves, it's all the same materials at the end of the day, it's become a joke.
 
Single threaded performance drops don't really mean much, and it's not particularly useful to compare it to chips of years gone, because chips now have multiple cores and can execute multiple threads, this means that the single threaded performance of previous chips doesn't matter because they can't move beyond single threaded performance.

It's all about the parallel optimisation. Some applications see a literally linear increase in performance from adding more cores, and out and out performance is what really matters most.
 
The silver lining.. No need to upgrade CPU means your current hardware will last far longer and represent more value..

The next big breakthrough will be HSA, CPU / GPU fusion..
 
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Its that age old human trait of greed.Corporate greed to be exact and they all play the game.The Titan for example in an ideal world would have been called the 780 GTX and cost £400 like every other graphics card did.


But someone somewhere has said here hold on a minute boyo,If we drip feed these chumps some of our lesser products we can sell our top of the line products later on for more money and strech our lineup for longer.


I still have my 580 and when i look at the 780 compared to it i dont see why its worth £550 when it only has 3GB of GDDR5.Others have bought them though and as such until everyone says no the problem will continue.I might look into AMD 8970 6GB around christmas time if possible and if its reasonable then i will buy one and give Nvidia my two fingers.I gave Intel the two fingers by buying thier cheapest IVY and clocked it by 37%.Before that i hung on to my old Core 2 Duo as i felt i deserved more for my money.
 
Lack of competition at the top end.

To some extent consoles slowing down gaming development, just look at the scope of bf1942 to bf3.

Growth of tablets and alternatives to pc's potentially resulting in dev. money going elsewhere?
 
There is potential to increase single threaded performance significantly but ultimately its not... its not correct to say its not needed, its just inefficient.

2 cores running at 4Ghz will use exponentially less power than 1 core running at 8 Ghz, and frankly 2 cores at 4Ghz, the die size cost is expensive vs 1 core, but massively cheaper than creating incredibly high speed capable processes.

Ultimately so many devices DON'T need single threaded performance or high clock speeds and having a process and foundry that can make a whole range of chips for various devices needs to be a relatively one size fits all process. We're talking about billions, realistically 10's of billions now in R&D for future processes(much spread across many companies) and similar amounts in equipping a fab, the more chips and the more types of chips that fab can produce the better the cost gets spread.

To be honest I think hardware always came before software, and Intel decided to stop adding cores quite a few years ago in mainstream. They are making very small chips but creating a lack of upgrading urgency. By not pushing 8 cores into mainstream pricing, they aren't pushing any game makers or any other high performance software makers to come up with ways to use 8 cores of performance. But because of the very small upgrade in performance they've moved the market more from "upgrade because I need more performance as my computer is slow" to "upgrade when my old computer dies".... which is FAR less frequently.

5 or 10 years ago I never saw an enthusiast forum full of people saying "meh the new Intel isn't worth the upgrade, wait for something in two gens when maybe Intel add some more cores"

Whats quite funny is with Intel that, they've reduced sales because people are upgrading less, and they've reduced die size, so they are currently running WAY below capacity at their fabs which cost a crapload to kit out. If they were making 8 core chips they would have more demand, and because the chips would be bigger, the fabs would be closer to capacity :p

CPU's have been boring for ages. A 2500k would last you freaking ages.
 
its just to eak out the pc market that bit longer

same as cpu socket changes,no real need to do it imo other than to make us all spend again on motherboards/cpu's

pretty soon they are gonna be at the limit of the nm shrinking process,then what?

they have already intentionally crippled overclocking on ivy/haswell with cheap paste under the ihs
 
Ya Wazza i would not say cripple as were talking 10c here from de-lidding Ivy or Haswell but yea you know if they corrected that fault on Ivy i might of just sold this motherboard and cpu to my uncle who is building haswell now next week and swapped Ivy for haswell.10c is a good 400mhz or more nothing to sniff at!


But really i couldnt even be bothered to start to take it apart too much hassle and too much risk of not getting my 2400 ram to work.That pretty much summs it up how often would people of jumped at that chance 3 years ago?
 
AMD have fallen behind so Intel are "walking it".

It's got to the point now where Intel are basically taking it easy on AMD (If your one of the only two horses in town you never want to kill off your competition, that makes you first/best but also last/worst, hence why Microsoft bailed Apple out when they needed it instead of going for the kill).
 
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In the 1990's, early 2000's, software was becoming far more complex as applications evolved from effectively DOS based to GUI based windowed programs Wordperfect 6 to MS Word etc. Install disks rose from 2 or 3 floppies to 10 or more, then CD's. It was far more important to have a faster processor and doubling your ram really did have a large impact on load times and performance.

Now general programs will run on a wide range of equipment, from the fastest down to a processor with only 10% of the throughput of the fastest. Hex core Intel to Atom.

Gaming is the exception however the pace of game development on the PC has also slowed considerably over the last decade.

At one time I would have upgraded every two years, now three, four or more is acceptable. The only reason to upgrade is play with new stuff.
 
eddyr said:
Wasn't most of you question answered in here :p
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=24504881#post24504881
Click to expand...

This is probably the best answer you're going to get if you want a serious discussion. If you just want a winge then carry on!

My answer:

That graph could do with updating - the last data points in the "single thread" series look like about 2007. The "decrease" only appears in their forecast, and might be shown to be wrong with new data.

In any case, the "single thread" performance they measure is a highly variable thing depending on the benchmark. I think the legend there says "SpecINT", which presumably means this. As it says on the wiki, most of the improvement in this benchmark is probably due to vectorisation (which is a bit like parallelisation in a single core) which is highly dependent on the instruction sets available to the CPU and the performance of the compiler. With this in mind there is no reason at all to expect single-threaded performance to decrease - look at the recent doublings of CPU performance with AVX etc.

If you want realtime raytracing games just look to more and more powerful GPUs. As a massively parallel problem the answer is massively parallel architectures.
 
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